When Richard Chartres appointment as Bishop of London was announced it
produced some highly predictable media coverage. The BBC early evening news
dispensed with any personal detail of life and ministry preferring to wheel in
homosexual and feminist lobbyists to comment on this traditionalist throwback
and ending with the woman commentator snarling through gritted teeth the curious
and inexplicable protest - "This means that two of the three top jobs in
the Church of England are held by men!".

The commentator was clearly far more outraged than the lobbyists, who have
been far from unkindly treated by Chartres in his time at Stepney and were
simply putting down some very public markers. Traditionalists, meanwhile, were
clearly pleased, but utterly realistic. Their reactions ranged from a
Restoration enthusiasm to the more sober assessment that any other candidate
would have been much worse. Those who have followed Chartres ministry will be
aware that the people amongst whom he has worked retain a deep affection for him
and that even those in the structure who are not over-fond of him regard him as
a highly intelligent and capable man who stands out amongst his peers. A regular
comment from clergy and laity alike is: "he looks, speaks and acts like a
real bishop." As the man who spent nine years at the right hand of Robert
Runcie he could not have had a greater opportunity to understand the
opportunities and pitfalls of high office.

On a bright, clear winter day with the threat of snow in the air we met in
the study at London House. Only a few volumes are on the shelves as the moving
in is far from fully completed The sections already in place are an interesting
indicator - shelves on the episcopate, Greek history and culture, the Holy
Spirit, Gospel commentaries and the origins of the Chartres family and their
famous cathedral! And a shelf on the history of the City of London and its
churches and distinctive life. On the wall above his desk he has hung the
picture of Bishop Juxon, the Laudian protégé whose fairness to all
churchmanships made him the obvious candidate for Canterbury at the Restoration.
Chartres himself is tall, imposing, slightly thinning and bearded with a manner
that is both welcoming and serious and spins into conversation about mission and
our common experience of East End ministry as if continuing a conversation,
momentarily interrupted, with an old friend. Volumes by "Cosmo"
(Bishop of Stepney 1901, Archbishop of York 1908, Canterbury 1928) and Mudie
Smith spill onto the table as he teases at the disconnection of men from the
Gospel. Why and when did men cut off? When you visit a house as a priest, he
recalls, the husband will take one look at you and say, "Oh good evening
Vicar, you must want the wife". Isn't it true? I remember many baptism
visits in Poplar having that response and I used to say, "Why? Isn't it
your baby too?". Only once did I get the reply, "No it * ! * ! * !well
isn't!"

But Chartres is wrestling with the missing men in the same way Daniel Cozens
does in his Walk of 1000 men. Why do Muslim and Jewish men see it as essential
to get stuck in and so many Christian men regard faith and morality as women's
work? There is a "loss of potency and guts" in English Christianity -
he summarises this with an anatomical term. I proffer the consistent experience
of the ordinands I have known that too many theological colleges have an unhappy
tendency to emasculate and eviscerate their male candidates in the quest for the
new cardinal virtue of "flexibility".

A diplomatic Chartres agrees that too many are "educated into less
usefulness" and is enthusiastic about the development of the London
Ministerial Training Scheme. Traditionalists will watch this one with interest
and caution, familiar as they are with the abominations of other Diocese MTS
schemes. Certainly London is a large diocese with massive resources. If they
cannot do it no-one can. Chartres is insistent that London MTS will have a huge
emphasis on the spiritual dimension and, what he calls, "a greater sense of
rootedness in the corporate prayer of the church ". Common prayer, daily
offices - so neglected - not an achievement but a minimum prerequisite. Half the
allotted time, I realise with horror, has already gone in a mutual excitement
about mission and education. This may be good Christianity but it is bad journalism! "You
cut me short whenever you want," he says. O.K.!

Tell me about yourself. Where did you begin?

"My Mum was from Bow. By one of those curious loops I ended up living in
the house of the vicar who married her for the first time. She was widowed three
times. My father was an Irish Huguenot. There's just been a book published on my
great uncle, John Chartres called "Mystery Man of the Treaty". He was
a member of Sinn Fein and a Protestant civil servant. He was also undoubtedly a
gun runner for Michael Collins."

These are the perfect genetic qualifications for another job! Did you have
any brothers and sisters?

"Stephen was two years younger and had a severe mental handicap. He died
in his twenties. He couldn't walk properly or talk clearly yet he was full of
joy and loved music and life. He was a great influence on my life. Any interest
my parents might have had in God was killed off by Stephen's birth but it gave
me two great advantages. First it meant I came from the majority i.e. outside
the church but second and more important it posed a question every day of my
life. What was life about if Stephen was disqualified from the "Glittering
Prizes?". Later on, when I had ordinands, I used to send them to L'ARCHE
communities (for the handicapped) so that they could have their emotional
deficit restored."

School? What were you good at?

"I went to Hertford Grammar School and it would have to be drama. I can
remember playing two parts particularly. One was the First Tempter in Murder in
the Cathedral - Becket's alter ego and leaning on Augustine's throne behind him.
Years later I found myself really there for the rehearsal for Robert Runcie's
enthronement - it all came rushing back. The second was Dr Marvel, the horse
doping fiend from a Pinero farce. After that I always got the bad guys - Pontius
Pilate and Nebuchadnezzar." (I ruefully reflected that I had obviously been
in the wrong production. The priest who had been a remarkable Last Tempter to my
Becket 25 years ago has just resigned under the measure and, as a member of
Forward in Faith I could look forward to the privilege of martyrdom without the
distraction of high office.) "Drama is a good way of relating to people
without beginning with the church." (Some Albanians can remember his last
outing as Ack Knee, son of the Grand Vizier Hiss Boo in the St Albans municipal
panto.) "Also it's marvellous for rote learning. Educational philosophers
who are against this are WRONG! Language learnt reverberates in the inner space
and feeds in an almost physical way. I love poetry, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton
these are important people in my life. I have a life mask in my working place of
Blake and I read copious draughts of him or Burke before sleep as an antidote to
the deathless prose of committees and Synod documents."

A radical and conservative in the same evening?

"Burke is a romantic conservative - not an Adam Smith market man. After
the death of Marie Antoinette he commented that the world had fallen into the
hands of sophists, economists and calculators. All that matters is what can be
counted and measured. We are still there - god is the economy whose temperature
is taken daily on the Dow Jones or Hang Sen. It is the triumph of management
over vision."

Isn't that how the government and the church are trying to go?

"Yes, but this is not a party political point. I don't believe in that.
It is a comment on a social reality."

Going back to language you're a great Book of Common Prayer man aren't you?

"I was converted to Christianity through the Book of Common Prayer. I
was eventually ordained according to the Prayer Book rite. My first celebration
of the Holy Communion was in the words of 1662. I was married by the Prayer
Book. My children were baptised using the Prayer Book. The present Archbishop
was generous enough to agree to my request to be consecrated using the Prayer
Book. I gratefully conform to the Prayer Book Offices every day and I have left
instructions that I am to be buried using the rite of the Book of Common
Prayer"

After school?

"I asked my father and he said, "Your grandfather went to
Trinity". So I applied. I was in my final year before he told me he had
meant Trinity, Dublin."

How did you fit in? What did you read?

"History. I was really very gauche - no social ability at all; but
people were extraordinarily kind and it was a great liberation. For the first
term I assumed that the wash basin was the only bath and was too shy to ask.
Then I saw a maths don clutching a vodka bottle and clad only in a towel reeling
across the quad. I followed him and there were the bathrooms." (Hard to
think now, but it was about this time that the Conservative Association first
lowered its standards and let grammar school boys join!) "Chapel was
packed. Harry Williams, with whom I didn't agree about anything, was
intellectually fascinating. Every service was an event!"

And the history?

"I've always felt a great connectedness to the past - its reality. Its
not nostalgia - I am always looking over the horizon but that history sense is
common to Celtic families." (At this point he launches into a complete
remembrance of the Russian rediscovery of the bones of St Seraphim of Sarov,
healer and popular saint of the poor.) "While English saints like
Wilberforce were involved in social action, Seraphim was in the forest, healing,
talking to the bears and being transfigured." (Chartres was in St
Petersburg when his bones emerged from the vaults of the Museum of Atheism.)
"The enthusiasm of the people was not superstition but a welling up of that
knowledge of the communion of saints and our re-membering the Body of Christ and
participation in it. Western man is trapped in his rational calculating faculty.
This is very different from Platonic reason. This limited rationality has no
first order knowledge, subject to subject. When you are dealing with the
communion of saints its a different spiritual faculty, all too often oppressed
and hobbled by the mind." (While acknowledging the astonishing achievement
of the age of reason, Chartres foresees the continuing atrophying and
atomization of a society suffocating with information and starving for wisdom
which is unwinding into chaos. There is a need for "new leadership for the
dark times already upon us" in the church and faithful christian
communities "which will embody and encode the catholic faith for the
future.")

Is it true that you left Cuddesdon under a cloud, were regarded as
outrageously reactionary and told there was no future for you in the C of E?

"Yes. It was the year of the barricades and I arrived in a bowler hat
and voted against all "modernizations". Some of it was genuine belief,
some was immaturity. Runcie tolerated eccentrics, others didn't. I took a year
or two out working in Sainsbury's and then in forestry before completing my
training. Runcie and I disagreed (and disagree) about virtually everything, but
he had an ability to work with people who didn't agree with him."

What about the seemingly endless appointment of chums?

"He spent very little time on appointments and left it mainly to
others."

You have depressed many orthodox recently by saying you are enthusiastic
about women priests' ministry?

"It is a radical discontinuity and a premature decision. We are in
danger of simply following cultural patterns. I am not persuaded by the
arguments in favour and I have always voted against. But I am en enthusiastic
for women's ministry in the same way I have worked with women Methodist
ministers. Clearly the historical arguments of inferiority will not do."

I never heard that argued. The doctrine of creation, incarnation, headship,
scriptural authority, Jesus' example and early church practice, aren't they the
key areas?

"Yes that is where the debate must take place, in the mean time, both
tendencies must flourish."

And appointments. Are you going to be another conservative who bends over
backwards to appoint liberals while liberals appoint their own?

"No. There will be a fair balance in London while I am Bishop."

And can we expect the appointment of bishops who are not deeply compromised,
Romeward bound or bleating on about "terminal care"?

"Yes"

Many speak of you as young, dynamic and a future Canterbury. What do you say?

"For a man touching 50 in business this would be a laughable question. I
am committed to London and very positive about it. It is the hub of a huge
international communications network, a place of enormous diversity and endless
gospel possibilities. A bishop needs to be a missionary figure as well as a
pastor and I am committed to the London Missions Action Plan. People talk about
London as "a bed of nails" - I think it has the most wonderful
opportunities for God."

Have you ever been tempted by Rome or orthodoxy?

"No. It would be faithless of me to abandon the C of E. No-one would
inherit the opportunities. But we mustn't pine for the old securities. No church
will survive the great sifting of the times we are going through. The nation is
fragmenting. It has no common songs to sing around the fire. Only the church can
tell the story that created the nation and it must speak in words of fire. We
must not be the church of the limerick, you know:

There was an old man of Moravia Who didn't believe in our Saviour So set up
instead With him at its head A cult of decorous behaviour"

(There is a passion and presence and authority about Chartres that marks him
out. Spend an hour or two in his company and the mixture of intellect, prophecy,
vision and intensity leave you in no doubt that his ministry will achieve
greatness or disaster. His choice of trusty companions and personal discipline
will determine which. Certainly he will be a key figure in the critical years
ahead.)

As we get to the door he offers to hold my coat. I politely decline. He
insists and, with a dark smile, quotes John Updike: "Why do clergy find it
so difficult to minister to one another? In a congress of masseurs nobody turns
their back".

Robbie Low is the Vicar of St Peter's, Bushey Heath in the diocese of St
Alban's.